Web / SEO
Industry: Retail
2.4x
Organic traffic
In short
Arcetis rebuilt a retail business's online storefront on Next.js, adding Stripe payment processing, an inventory management system, and technical SEO fixes to replace a checkout flow that was leaking conversions. The result was a 2.4x increase in organic traffic and a 38% increase in conversion rate, alongside faster page loads, structured data, and a frictionless checkout.
This engagement involved a retail business selling products online whose storefront was underperforming on two fronts at once: search visibility and checkout completion. The site wasn't earning the organic search traffic a retail catalog depends on, which put more pressure on paid channels and direct traffic than a properly optimized storefront should require. At the same time, the checkout process itself was working against the business — visitors who did arrive, whether from search, ads, or word of mouth, were dropping off before completing a purchase. Arcetis was brought in to treat both problems as a single project rather than two disconnected fixes, since a faster, better-structured storefront also tends to convert better, and a smoother checkout keeps more of the traffic that SEO work sends in the door. The scope covered the storefront itself, payment processing, and inventory management.
Low organic visibility and a leaking checkout are two different problems, but for a retail e-commerce business they compound each other. On the visibility side, the storefront wasn't earning the organic search traffic a retail catalog should generate. Product and category pages typically underperform in search when pages load slowly, when metadata and structured data are missing or inconsistent, when URLs and internal linking aren't organized around what shoppers actually search for, and when Core Web Vitals scores are poor enough to affect ranking. Any combination of those issues suppresses organic traffic regardless of how good the products or pricing are, since search engines and shoppers both treat a slow, poorly structured storefront as a weaker match for a query than a fast, well-marked-up competitor. On the conversion side, a "leaking" checkout means visitors are reaching the cart or payment step and not completing the purchase. For a retail storefront, that leakage typically comes from friction in the payment flow itself — too many steps, unclear error states, redirects that break trust, or a checkout experience that doesn't match the polish of the rest of the site — combined with backend issues like inventory that isn't accurately reflected at checkout, which erodes trust when items go out of stock after a customer has already committed to buying them. Every point of friction in that flow is a point where a visitor who was ready to buy decides not to. The two problems reinforce each other in a way that makes fixing only one of them unsatisfying. Improving SEO without fixing checkout means driving more visitors into a funnel that was already losing them. Fixing checkout without improving SEO caps the upside, because there's a ceiling on how much traffic a slow, poorly indexed storefront can attract in the first place. The business needed a rebuild that treated the storefront, the payment flow, and the inventory system as one connected piece of infrastructure — fast and well-structured enough to rank and be found, and frictionless enough at checkout that the traffic it earned actually converted into completed orders.
Arcetis led the end-to-end rebuild of the storefront, from technical SEO strategy through checkout implementation. Arcetis audited the existing site's search performance and page speed, then rebuilt the storefront on Next.js with technical SEO fundamentals — structured data, metadata, and fast-loading pages — built in at the architecture level rather than added after launch. Arcetis integrated Stripe for payment processing, designing the checkout flow to minimize the steps and friction points that had been costing conversions. Arcetis built the inventory management system that keeps product availability accurate across the storefront, so checkout reflects real stock levels rather than creating mismatches after the fact. Arcetis designed the interface in Tailwind CSS and managed deployment on Vercel, handling the performance tuning needed to keep pages fast under real traffic.
Arcetis rebuilt the storefront's frontend on Next.js with SEO built into the architecture rather than added afterward: clean URL structures, server-rendered and statically generated product and category pages, complete metadata, and structured data markup so search engines could parse products, prices, and availability directly from the page. Page speed was treated as an SEO input, not just a usability nicety, since slow-loading product pages tend to rank and convert worse. The rebuild gave the storefront a technical foundation built to be found, crawled, and indexed correctly rather than working against the search engines it depended on.
Arcetis integrated Stripe as the storefront's payment processor, replacing the friction in the prior checkout flow with a streamlined path from cart to completed order. The integration covers the core mechanics a retail checkout depends on: secure payment capture, order confirmation, and handling for the range of card and payment scenarios a retail customer base generates. Because checkout friction was one of the two problems driving the project, the payment flow was built and tested as its own critical path rather than as an afterthought layered onto the rest of the site.
Arcetis built an inventory management system to keep product availability accurate across the storefront and at checkout. Retail checkout flows lose customer trust quickly when a shopper can add an out-of-stock item to their cart, or worse, complete a purchase for something that isn't actually available — both scenarios create refunds, support tickets, and lost repeat business. Tying inventory state directly into the storefront and checkout flow closes that gap, so what a shopper sees as available is what's actually available at the moment they pay.
Arcetis designed and implemented the storefront's interface using Tailwind CSS, building a consistent, component-based design system rather than one-off page styling. A consistent design system matters for a retail storefront because it keeps checkout visually and behaviorally consistent with the rest of the site — one of the friction points that erodes trust at checkout is a payment flow that looks or feels like a different product than the storefront a customer was just browsing. Tailwind's utility-first approach also kept the frontend lightweight, supporting the page-speed goals tied to the SEO work.
Arcetis deployed and hosts the storefront on Vercel, pairing the Next.js frontend with Vercel's edge network and build pipeline to keep pages fast for visitors regardless of location. Performance work here was inseparable from the SEO objective, since page speed functions as both a ranking factor and a conversion factor — slow pages lose visitors before they ever reach checkout. Vercel's platform also supports the incremental rendering approaches Next.js uses for product catalogs, so pages stay fast even as inventory and product data change.
The rebuild was approached as a single connected system — storefront, payment, and inventory — rather than three separate workstreams bolted together, since the business problem itself was two intertwined issues (visibility and conversion) rather than two unrelated ones. On the frontend, the storefront was built on Next.js, which supports the mix of rendering strategies a retail catalog needs: product and category pages that benefit from being pre-rendered or incrementally regenerated for speed and SEO, alongside dynamic elements like cart state and checkout that need to respond to real-time inventory and payment status. For an e-commerce catalog, this typically means static generation or incremental static regeneration for product listing and detail pages — so search engines get fast, fully rendered HTML to crawl and index — combined with client-side interactivity for cart and checkout, where the user's session state actually matters. The SEO work followed the standard technical checklist for a storefront rebuild: clean, descriptive URL structures organized around product and category taxonomy; complete metadata (titles, descriptions, canonical tags) generated per page rather than duplicated across the catalog; and structured data — JSON-LD schema.org markup for Product, Offer, and Breadcrumb types is standard practice for retail storefronts — so search engines can surface rich results like pricing and availability directly in search listings. Image optimization (responsive sizing, modern formats, lazy loading) and attention to Core Web Vitals — largest contentful paint, cumulative layout shift, and interaction responsiveness — are the other standard levers for both search ranking and perceived speed, and both were treated as first-class requirements of the rebuild rather than post-launch cleanup. Payment processing runs through Stripe, integrated using its standard checkout and payment intent APIs, with webhook handling to confirm orders and update state once a payment clears. For a retail storefront, the typical pattern is to keep the checkout flow as short as possible — minimizing redirects, form fields, and account-creation requirements — since each additional step is a point where a ready buyer can abandon the purchase. Stripe's hosted or embedded checkout components are commonly used specifically because they offload PCI compliance and card-handling complexity from the storefront itself, letting the integration focus on flow and experience rather than payment security internals. Inventory management was built to sit between the product catalog and the checkout flow, so stock levels shown to a shopper reflect what's actually available at the moment of purchase. The standard approach for this kind of system is to treat inventory as a source of truth that both the storefront display and the checkout/payment flow read from and update — decrementing stock on order confirmation and reflecting out-of-stock states on the product page before a customer ever reaches checkout, rather than after. The interface itself was built with Tailwind CSS, which lends itself to a component-based design system: reusable button, form, and layout primitives applied consistently across product pages, cart, and checkout, keeping the storefront visually and behaviorally cohesive end to end. Deployment runs on Vercel, which pairs naturally with a Next.js frontend — the build and preview pipeline, edge caching, and CDN distribution are the pieces that keep page load times low for visitors regardless of where they're browsing from, which matters both for the Core Web Vitals underpinning the SEO work and for keeping checkout responsive under real traffic.
The storefront rebuild included JSON-LD structured data for products, offers, and site navigation — the standard schema.org markup that lets search engines parse price, availability, and breadcrumb context directly from a page rather than inferring it from unstructured content. This is one of the more direct levers for organic visibility in retail search results, since it affects whether a listing can surface rich details in search results rather than appearing as a plain link with no product context attached.
Product and category pages were built using Next.js's static generation and incremental regeneration capabilities rather than rendering everything client-side. This gives search engines fast, fully formed HTML to crawl for SEO purposes while still letting product and pricing data update without a full site rebuild — a standard tradeoff for retail catalogs where product counts and stock levels change on an ongoing basis rather than staying fixed.
Payment processing was integrated through Stripe's checkout and payment intent APIs, with webhook handling to confirm orders as payments clear. Keeping the checkout flow short, and building it on Stripe's own compliance-handling components rather than custom card processing, is standard practice for reducing the steps and friction that cause cart abandonment on a retail site, and for keeping payment security out of the storefront's own code paths.
Inventory management was wired directly into the checkout flow, so stock levels shown on a product page reflect what's actually available at the moment a customer pays, rather than becoming out of sync after the fact. This closes one of the more common trust gaps in retail checkout experiences — customers completing an order for an item that turns out not to be in stock, which damages trust regardless of how fast or polished the rest of the flow was.
Image optimization, code splitting, and Vercel's edge caching were used together to keep page load times low across the storefront. Core Web Vitals — load speed, layout stability, and interaction responsiveness — function as both a search ranking input and a conversion input, since slow pages lose visitors before they ever reach checkout, regardless of how well the checkout itself is designed.
Organic traffic
Conversion
Technology used
Key learnings
This engagement is a useful example of why SEO and conversion work are often best treated as one project rather than two. It's common for businesses to invest in search visibility and checkout optimization separately, on different timelines, sometimes with different teams — but the two are mechanically linked: a storefront that ranks well but converts poorly is wasting the traffic it earns, and a storefront that converts well but doesn't rank is capped on how much traffic it can convert in the first place. Addressing both at once, on a single technical foundation, meant that decisions made for one goal — a fast-loading, well-structured Next.js frontend, for instance — directly supported the other, since page speed and clean markup serve both search ranking and user experience simultaneously. It also demonstrates the value of building SEO fundamentals — structured data, metadata, page speed — into a site's architecture from the start rather than retrofitting them after launch. And it shows why inventory accuracy belongs in the checkout conversation, not just the operations conversation: a checkout can be fast and well designed and still lose customer trust if what it sells doesn't match what's actually in stock. For a retail business, organic visibility, checkout experience, and inventory accuracy function as one system, and treating them that way is what produced the traffic and conversion gains in this engagement.
Checkout leakage usually comes from friction — too many steps, unclear payment flows, or a checkout experience that doesn't match the rest of the site — combined with backend issues like inventory that isn't accurately reflected at the point of payment. In this engagement, Arcetis addressed both by integrating Stripe for a streamlined payment flow and building an inventory management system so stock levels stayed accurate through checkout, contributing to a 38% increase in conversion rate.
Technical SEO for retail storefronts centers on structured data (so search engines can read product, price, and availability information directly), clean metadata and URL structure, and page speed, since slow pages tend to rank and convert worse. Arcetis rebuilt the storefront on Next.js with these fundamentals built into the architecture, which contributed to a 2.4x increase in organic traffic.
That stack gives full control over rendering strategy, page speed, and structured data — all of which matter directly for SEO — while still relying on established, well-supported tools for payment processing (Stripe), styling (Tailwind), and hosting (Vercel). It's a common choice for retail businesses that need a storefront tailored to their specific SEO and conversion goals rather than a generic template designed for a different kind of store.
Results vary by starting point and catalog size, but in this engagement, addressing both problems together on one technical foundation produced a 2.4x increase in organic traffic and a 38% increase in conversion rate, alongside faster pages, structured data, and a frictionless checkout. The underlying principle is that visibility and conversion improvements compound when built on the same foundation rather than pursued separately.